"Love is strange," goes the song. But aren't lovers stranger? Maybe not you, but what about your middle-aged pal, besotted with a girl young enough to be his daughter? What could he be thinking? And "strange" is no longer the descriptor many would use. How about the various synonyms for "disgusting"?
However, in "Her Father, My Lover" ("Tomodachi no Papa ga Suki"), veteran television commercial director Kenji Yamauchi's ensemble drama, the shoe is on the other generational and gender foot. Its youthful heroine Maya (Wako Ando), with her round nerd glasses, earnestly informs her friend, Taeko (Yukino Kishii), that Taeko's dad, Kyosuke (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), is her type. "You're perverted," says Taeko, one of the film's saner characters. Maya smilingly insists that she is completely serious — and proceeds to aggressively seduce the baffled Kyosuke. What could go wrong?
Premiering in the Japanese Cinema Splash section of this year's Tokyo International Film Festival, "Her Father, My Lover" promises to be a sex comedy of the role-reversal sort. Yamauchi, who also wrote the script, gives comic tweaks to his story of romantic cross-signals, but it is mostly as straightforward as its loopy heroine, while piling on the coincidences, crises and varieties of extreme behavior. The result is a hipster soap opera, with winking ironies and overwrought artificialities in equal measure.